Sir Alexander Cuming

Sir Alexander Cuming is the novel's study of imperial presumption. He arrived in Charles Town in 1730 with fraudulent promissory notes and a grand scheme to establish himself as mediator between the Cherokee and the British Crown. He had no official commission. He had no wilderness experience. He could not navigate the forest without guides.

What he had was certainty. He wrote constantly in his journal because numbers made things real. He counted miles, trees, Cherokee warriors, the items in his bags. His journal is one of the novel's primary documentary sources, rendered in the “Record” voice: the obsessive cataloging of a man who believed that writing things down gave him authority over them.

At Nequassee, he placed a metal rim on Moytoy's head and declared him Emperor of the Cherokee. The ceremony was largely Cuming's invention. He then selected seven Cherokee men, including the young Attakullakulla, to travel to London as evidence of his diplomatic achievement.

In London, he presented the Cherokee delegation to King George II and the Lords of Trade. The Articles of Friendship and Commerce were signed. But the colonial officials recognized the diplomatic value of what he had initiated and no longer needed him. The novel traces what happens to a man who sets something in motion and is then discarded by the system he served.

The novel treats Cuming not as a villain but as something more unsettling: a man who believed completely in what he was doing and never understood what it meant. He imposed a title, created a ceremony, transported people across an ocean, and was discarded by the very system he served. His journal, meticulous and deluded, is one of the few surviving accounts of the Nequassee ceremony.

Sir Alexander Cuming, 2nd Baronet of Culter. The baronetcy was a Scottish title, inherited rather than earned. Colonial records refer to him as “Sir Alexander Cuming” consistently. Cherokee sources do not preserve a Cherokee name for him; he moved through Cherokee country as a foreign visitor, not someone integrated into the kinship networks that would generate a Cherokee name.

Cuming spent the remaining forty-five years of his life petitioning the British government for recognition and reward. He submitted proposals for Cherokee colonization schemes, alchemical projects, and financial plans. None were accepted. He died in London in 1775, largely forgotten.

His journal survives as one of the few firsthand accounts of the Nequassee ceremony and the London delegation. Historians have used it cautiously, noting Cuming's tendency toward self-aggrandizement and his unreliable relationship with facts. The novel draws on the journal extensively, rendering it in the “Record” voice that exposes the gap between what Cuming wrote and what he understood.

His story is ultimately about the machinery of empire: a man who set something in motion, was used by the system he served, and was discarded when he was no longer useful. The Cherokee delegation he brought to London shaped half a century of British-Cherokee relations. Cuming himself shaped nothing. He was the mechanism, not the architect.

Cuming's story is told in Emperor of the Cherokee.